


The Gods Are Dead

by applepieisworthit



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Angst, F/M, Family, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Greek gods, Hate, Love, Mentions of incest, Multi, Other, Zeus being his typical lecherous self, fair warning the poem this is based off of made me cry, nothing graphic, sad stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-06-26
Packaged: 2018-06-07 20:51:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 3,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6823645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applepieisworthit/pseuds/applepieisworthit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A new story about the Greek Gods! </p>
<p>It's based off of this tumblr post: http://crossroadsbela.tumblr.com/post/110393424709/the-old-gods-are-dead-zeus-sits-at-the-bar-hell so I take no credit for the poem.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Zeus

**Author's Note:**

> It's based off of this tumblr post: http://crossroadsbela.tumblr.com/post/110393424709/the-old-gods-are-dead-zeus-sits-at-the-bar-hell so I take no credit for the poem - which is in italics at the end of each chapter (corresponding to the character)

Zeus sits and stares into the large tumbler of whiskey in his hand. The ice has long since melted and the cheap scotch burns as it slides down his throat, but it does nothing for him, just as no alcohol has ever done anything for him. Not since ambrosia. He finishes the drink any way and gestures for another.

 

He wears the body that he has for a millennia. Middle-aged, non-descript and practically invisible. He can’t remember a time when the people believed in him, or his brothers, his sisters, his children. It’s been so long, and now they are just stories.

 

His eyes flit over the giggling college girls in the corner, taking in their young curves and voluptuous bodies and he thinks of a time when he would have walked over and gone home with any number of them. Of a time when he was the king of everything and all young girls would willingly offer themselves to him.

 

He smiles flirtatiously at a young girl looking his way and she flinches, tearing her eyes from his and shifting uncomfortably in her seat. He can see in her thoughts the disgust that she feels, and the reassuring way she reminds herself of the pepper spray tucked in her sleeve and the rape whistle attached to her hip.

 

Zeus turns back to his drink and thinks of the old days, when he ruled on high from Olympus.

 

_Zeus sits at the bar, he’ll buy a thousand and one drinks and the girls who he smiles at will raise their eyebrows and think of the pepper spray tucked into their sleeves._


	2. Hera

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is the next section of the poem (in italics at the end - doesn't belong to me) and the chapter I've written to correspond to it.

Hera stares at the computer screen, at the open Facebook pages of every girl her husband ever thinks about and waits for him to come home. The mouse hovers over the message icons, just waiting to send them a message, but she never does, and she never will.

She has her phone in one hand and she dials a number, rings it and hangs up before someone answers. She wants to call every girl and let them know the truth, that men are liars and cheats and will never be true to anyone but themselves. The truth that she had discovered millions of years ago the first time Zeus cheated on her. 

She has long since given up being angry, she is apathetic, lonely and has given up. She wants to write that men will always lie, wants it to be out in the world as much as possible. She wants to believe her own words and trust in them. But she can’t and she never will, because that’s not who she is.

Hera longs for a time that is different to the time that they ruled. Wants a time that she will feel whole in again.

_Hera waits at home. She knows the numbers of all the girls and she has their Facebooks open on the computer. Her hands hover over the keyboard., She wants to tell them that men will always lie. She wants to take her own advice. She never will._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter tomorrow - Apollo and Artemis


	3. Apollo and Artemis

Apollo slips his arm around Artemis’ waist and rests his hand on her other hip, never lower and certainly never higher. It has to look platonic, has to look like he thinks of her as the sister she supposedly should be. But he can't, and he never will.

 

In the privacy of their hotel room in Venice, Prague, Berlin, New York, Tokyo, Sydney, anywhere, they curl around each other and try to bury themselves in each other’s bodies. Fuse their souls together. They have been together forever, and they will always be together.

 

Artemis boards the plane next to Apollo and stares at the moon she loves so much, an ache in her heart that nowhere on Earth can fill. She misses her chariot, the one that followed her brother through the sky. She misses the mountain and the acceptance and her power.

 

Apollo’s soul breaks every time he looks at the sun, the wonderful burden that only he used to carry that no longer belongs to him. And he holds tighter to that which does and always will; Artemis.

 

In public they can’t show the affection that is, and always has been abundant between them and they both break a little more. Gluing themselves together in the shadows and places where no one will see the extent of their relationship. A relationship that was once pure and sacred, and is now dirty, something to be hidden.

 

_Apollo and Artemis travel the world. They are chasing the sun. Chasing the moon. They will never catch up. Their hands are curled around each other’s hip bones. Never in public though. They look too similar for that now. Society has learned judgement and so they keep their caresses safe in the shadows._


	4. Poseidon and Medusa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the kudoses! This chapter was so sad to write, cos I love Poseidon so much

Poseidon glares at the ocean, the thing he once loved most in the world. The one thing he always needed, that has been taken from him.

He clears the beaches, every single one, slowly and methodically. Dragging the bag of rubbish behind him, the staff holding him up a poor imitation of his once mighty trident. His tears replenish the damaged ocean and his heart breaks every time he sees another story on the news; of killed sharks and dolphins. Of his sea brethren being destroyed.

No one notices him, the old homeless man wandering the shores worldwide, trying to fix the damage done over thousands of years. And when he moves on no one notices his shadow.

A wild haired girl, hair that undulates without wind, follows Poseidon. Anger swirling in her gaze, Medusa delights in the fallen God’s sorrow. No snakes as hair now she settles for tormenting the man who cursed her.

And Poseidon wishes for the days when he ruled the seas, when, from Mount Olympus, the Gods ruled. But those days are gone and he wanders the beaches, heart aching as he stares at his oceans.

_Poseidon wanders the shore. He wears a plastic poncho and carries a bag of trash. His tears mix with the salt water. No one can tell the difference. A girl with hair that moves like serpents trails after him, retribution in her eyes._


	5. Hades

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was interesting writing Hades because he's the first of the Gods who are happy with the changes

Hades rules as he always has. He surveys his kingdom and is filled with triumph. His brothers and sisters are fallen and he remains. The last of the Gods of Olympus, ruling as he always has and always will. Because death is inevitable and people will never stop believing in it.

 

Persephone is at his side and he smirks when the souls that fill the underworld make a sound, because they belong to him – they are his souls now.

 

Finally, FINALLY, he has beaten Zeus at something; beaten the King of the Gods, the defeater of Cronos. Finally, he has beaten Poseidon, the ruler of the seas and the oceans and every beautiful piece of water that has now been contaminated. He has beaten his sisters, Hestia, Hera and Demeter, the beautiful goddesses who fade and wither away as the world gives up on them.

 

As the world will _never_ give up on him, because he exists forever. When all else fails Hades will be as powerful as he is now and was a millennia ago. Because death never stops.

 

_Hades lies in bed, his wife curled around him. He smiles because people will always believe in death and finally, finally he has beaten his brothers at something._


	6. Athena

Athena has never felt more alive as she fights for her people. She runs through college campuses and the streets, shouting for rights. She paces holding signs and pamphlets and fighting against the establishment that caused the downfall of her and the other Gods and Goddesses so many years ago.

 

Her heart fills with joy as she joins the young people fighting for their freedom, as she always has. Fighting for education and a life to live, amongst women in the 1920s and black people in the 1960s and LGBT+ people in the 2010s and in the future she will keep fighting. Because it keeps her going.

 

The knowledge she holds flows in her brain as she travels to poor countries in Africa to provide education. As she battles against the oppression worldwide.

 

She will not be beaten down; she screams as she marches against those who would hold her people down. And she has never felt more like the goddess she is than when her causes win and her people are triumphant.

 

_Athena paces through college campuses, handing out pamphlets on architecture. She scoffs at professors who are simply going through the motions. She carries signs in her hands as she marches through the streets with the students, screaming about the newest problem. She laughs wild, these children, these fearless children are her people._


	7. Hestia

Hestia is weeping, as she always is. She weeps for her children, and her brothers, and sisters, for her nieces and nephews and the people who used to worship them, but have now beaten her family into something she doesn’t recognise.

She wants it all back; the mountain and her family, however broken they were then, it is nothing compared to now. So she waits, just as Hera does, she waits for them to come back to her, her arms open and waiting to be filled by her family.

She has the love to give them, if they’d only come back to her to take it. Come back and find her door and her arms open for them, as they always have been. Goddess of the hearth and home, that’s what she was and now she has no hearth, no home, only the promise that they could be there, could exist again. If only someone would believe in her again, believe in her family again. If only. And bring them back to her.

But she knows they won’t come back, so she waits with a broken heart.

_Hestia wants her family to come home. She waits in the doorway, arms outstretched and a smile like forgiveness waiting to embrace the siblings whom she knows will never return._


	8. Demeter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've always loved Demeter - I feel so sorry for her..

Demeter spends her days waiting. Always waiting. She can’t remember a time when she wasn’t waiting for the spring, for her daughter to be returned to her.

 

Though she looks at her daughter now and longs for the days that sit like clouds at the back of her mind, hazy summer days, year round, where her innocent Persephone was with her. Always. But that’s over now and she spends six months of the year in the bitter cold of her heart, wishing for the spring and the summer when her awful brother Hades will give her back her child.

 

She watches the humans play in the snow and the fallen leaves of autumn and it breaks her heart to remember her own child and know that she is lost forever. Six pomegranate seeds and her life was destroyed. Millennia of six months without her child beside her and it hurts just the same as it always did.

 

She carries on, lives through the autumns and winters, as she always has and comes out the other side hopeful. For what, she doesn’t know. The days of gods and goddesses are over and all she can do now is watch nature carry on without her, carry on as she designed it to, all those years before.

 

Her only solace are the six months when her daughter comes back, and even then Persephone is not the same.

 

_Demeter counts down the days until her daughter returns. She smiles when children cheer over the snow days she gives them. There was a time when she had a child like that._


	9. Persephone

Persephone smirks to herself. The queen of the underworld, that’s her title, has been for an innumerable amount of years, and will be until the end of time. She is the perfect goddess for it.

 

She loves her Hades, in her own way, and she thrills to see her family shocked and horrified. The Queen of the Underworld is vengeful, and determined that she will not end up like Zeus, Poseidon, her mother or her aunts, waiting for a world that worshipped them long lost to time.

 

She will be remembered, and she is. In songs, and stories and films, the daughter of Demeter is memorialised by the world. And each time she grows stronger and prouder and kisses Hades to feel the rush of power.

 

She wears the flowers that her mother loves in her hair, smirking to herself as she strides around the Underworld decorated in beautiful blooms when above her, her mother weeps over the dying crops and plants of autumn and winter.

 

_Persephone kisses her husband and grins when people tremble. She is vengeful and wears flowers in her hair and she will make damn sure that the world will never forget her name._


	10. Ares

Ares trembles when he looks at the blood stained dirt beneath his feet. At the soldiers torn to pieces over a war fought for no reason. And his heart breaks again.

 

He has long since stopped understanding the need for war and battles and he rejoices in the loss of influence on them starting, though he wishes for the control he once had to be able to stop them. The memories of the senseless loss of life pass him in a blur; the Napoleonic wars, the great war, world war two, the cold war, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Afghanistan war, the Iran/Iraq war.

 

He stares at the ruins of a school, and a hospital and weeps for the lives lost and innocence he once had when he went into ‘glorious’ battle thousands of years ago and thousands of times. He stopped believing in the heroic and celebrated war when he stopped being a God, when the people he had once loved, turned on each other.

 

_Ares walks through the Middle East, picking his way around the ruins of an elementary school. He stopped understanding war a long time ago. This was not brave, this was not heroic. This was senseless._


	11. Aphrodite

Aphrodite scowls from where she sits on a park bench, watching the interactions of couples with a bitter feeling in her chest. She watches as boys wolf-whistle and cat-call terrified young women and the news fails to report the multitude of rapes happening. She clenches her fists in rage when she hears of date-rape drugs and the need for rape whistles and pepper spray to hold at bay the men who threaten women.

 

Love betrayed her many years ago. When they fell from grace and stopped being the gods and goddesses they were supposed to be she watched in horror the true nature of love and lust in the human world.

 

She can’t remember the last time she didn’t feel true anger at the thought of what love has come to mean. Of the divorces that happen all over. The murders and rapes and threats all in the name of ‘love’. And she hates herself a little bit more each time that she hears a story of love gone wrong. Because it used to be her domain, epic, true love stories that filled her heart to the brim, and now all that’s left are the broken remnants of a lie.

 

She is no longer the famed beauty she once was, long since gaunt, stretched thin and over-worked as she tries to get by in a world full of hate. She blames Pandora and the box that ruined her world. And when she returns home to Hephaestus, her husband, she is reminded of the lack of love in her life.

 

Every now and again she will see something that fills her heart a little, that puts glue to the fissures and cracks in her broken soul. She sees a child’s love for their mother, or a young adult working hard to provide for their parents. And sometimes, she sees Ares across a crowded room and both of their hearts are mended a bit at the reminder of the love they once used to have.

 

The love Aphrodite used to have in the world is gone, and she wishes for a time when she was the goddess of love and ruled with beauty and a full heart.

 

_Aphrodite narrows her eyes at boys in cars who yell obscene things. She’s long since stopped romanticizing love. She is gaunt and over worked but sometimes she sees a teenage girl handing her baby over to an older couple who had tried for years and she feels young again. Sometimes, she sees Ares from across the room as soldiers embrace their loved ones and they smile at each other._


	12. Hephaestus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry guys! I didn't realise I hadn't posted the final three chapters for this story so I'm gonna do that now!!

Hephaestus does as he always has, locked away from the world in the comfort of his forge. Yet, now, he is not reviled and loathed by the general populace. No one knows him anymore at that sits well with him.

 

He forges the world’s trinkets and builds their furniture and fixes breaks in the world itself – left there by his mother’s husband and his rowdy bunch of disparate gods and goddesses. He is still just as broken as before, just as ugly and lame, but now? Now, no one cares. He limps through the world, ignored and at peace.

 

Though he hates the way Zeus treats his mother, Hera, he doesn’t intervene. Too afraid of the past coming back to haunt him. Of the old ways of the gods of Olympus rising again, even though it has been so many lifetimes since they ruled on high.

 

For once, in his long and painful existence, the rest of his family are just as broken and distorted as Hephaestus, even his once beautiful wife, Aphrodite. And he feels a vindictive sense of achievement.

 

_Hephaestus limps through his shop, his hands are worn down, his back is still twisted but people don’t seem to notice anymore. He makes their furniture, their toys and trinkets and they thank him, they pay him._


	13. Hermes

Hermes is young and free and happy. He doesn’t answer to Zeus anymore and he has no obligations. He laughs and cries and shouts from the rooftops with no restrictions, celebrating the fall of the old gods. Of the superiors who would restrict him.

 

He is the definition of carefree with his loud laugh and his hair flowing behind him as he flits from country to country, city to city. Running through the streets of London, Paris, Prague, Sydney, Cape Town and anywhere that the wind takes him. His soul as free as the wings he once had.

 

He joyously shouts aloud as he runs from the law and the men and women he leaves in his wake. Stealing and fucking and laughing his way around the new world that never stops him. Not anymore.

 

_Hermes runs through the streets of New York, Tokyo, London. He is young in this time, young and beautiful and slipping between business men, his hands finding their way into their pockets. He never stops laughing._


	14. Dionysus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last (and my fave) chapter

Dionysus stands at the bar of a pub, a club, any drinking establishment, anywhere in the world, and passes his broken and scattered family their drinks. He pours the whiskey, vodka, wine, whatever they want and misses the ambrosia they had. Misses when he was the only God who had need for the vice of drinking.

 

He watches Zeus eye up young girls over his tumbler of whiskey. He watches Hera drown her sorrows in a large glass of wine and glare scathingly at anyone in her line of sight. He watches Apollo and Artemis sit as close as possible with their hands on each other’s thighs beneath the table and their other hands wrapped around glass of steaming hot and ice cold drinks respectively, anything to remind them of the sun and moon they miss so much. He watches Poseidon down glass after glass of any salty drink he can acquire, his constant tears mixing with the drink as if he can bring the ocean to the dingy bar.

 

He watches Hades drink his vodka, a triumphant smirk on his face as he sits with his vindictive wife in the corner and watches their family despair. He watches Athena as she throws back drinks that taste of victory before leaving to march for the freedom of people that she desperately wishes she were. He watches Hestia sip the cups of tea he makes for her, her eyes sad as they watch the family she loves fall apart. He watches Demeter drink gin and tonics and pimms and every summery drink she can get her hands on, anything to remind her of the laughing, light-hearted people her and her daughter, Persephone, used to be.

 

He watches Ares drown in the cheap beers and ales that the men he identifies with do, watches the young warrior trying to burn away the PTSD with the vicious taste of lager and bitter. He watches Aphrodite delicately sip her cocktails, sitting with her ugly husband and trying to regain the love she once felt and the beauty she once possessed. He watches Hephaestus drink strong and acrid alcohols, as he always as, and ignore the disgusted looks that their family sends him. He watches Hermes triumphantly throw back any drink he can, paid for with stolen money and a smirk on his handsome face.

 

Dionysus watches his family lose themselves and can do nothing.

 

_Dionysus mixes Zeus his drinks. He watches his family grin and cry and get sick in the back room of the bar. He holds back their hair and hands them another drink before they even ask. He’s been here a long time. He’s seen them drunk more often then he’s seen them sober. He is watching them flicker out and fade._

They break and fall apart and don’t get back up. They try to move on and they fail.

 

_The gods are dying._

They think of things that they used to have and they stop, because what’s the point.

 

_The gods are dead._

They resemble us. These gods that we used to worship. They bleed like humans and break hearts like humans and fail like humans.

 

_The gods are us._

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Next chapter tomorrow, most likely.


End file.
